Tuesday, November 22, 2011

This is a new art for a Vault classic, the 42" Drop Carve longboard. The client felt the deck needed a bit of a facelift despite being a really popular board.

I was inspired by the crazy cultists and their weapons in Mike Mignola's BPRD, and especially Guy Davis' designs. I deliberately didn't go back and look at their work when I had this idea though, as I didn't want their styles to influence this piece, I just wanted the ideas I guess.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

A guy contacted me recently after visiting this blog to commission me to design some art to grace his motorcycle. The brief was awesome - a tattoo-style werewolf, with Norwegian and Australian influences. While I wasn't able to squeeze in any Australiana, we came up with the above. The original design is on the left, and the client decided they wanted a more aggressive-looking wolf, which is where the face on the left comes in. The only changes left now are to remove the horns from the helmet. I'll be working on the finished piece (300mm wide x 200mm high) this week and hopefully I'll have something more to share shortly.

Friday, October 28, 2011

This is a pretend gig poster I did for a Melbourne band. Liz from the band runs the Shellac poster shop in High St Northcote and was kind enough to put a handful of my flyers advertising my lame services in her shop.

Inspired by a visit to an awesome little shop in Thornbury called "The Manufactory". They sell all sorts of fun stuff, including some hand-made steampunk goggles, headphones, aviator caps etc. Needless to say, we immediately began a lay-buy account.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

This is the final coloured version of the Samurai deck. I put up a sketch for this a little while ago. You have to imagine it bleeding off on all the edges. The trucks will sit above the little golden head decoration, and between the sword and the neck guard.

So this is yet another mockup, but this time showing the final, coloured-in art. The colours haven't been approved yet.

The red skin and white hair is more like a traditional oni (or tengu maybe?) but the client might not like the colours being similar to those used in the previous Samurai design. It makes sense though, because the face mask on the samurai armour is supposed to look like the face of an oni.

Anyway, the board this is being printed on hasn't even been manufactured yet, so it will be a while before you see this horrible visage on the streets. Looking forward to getting my greasy hands on the finished versions of the first series I did – the client has promised me physical samples of each deck! I will have to man up and get some trucks and wheels etc. and try one of the really intimidating longboards.

Monday, April 4, 2011

An old favourite returns. Great Destiny Man is an wandering ronin from Edo-period Japan, much like Itto Ogami from Lone Wolf and Cub, but where Itto is noble and tragic, GDM is basically just wrong. Seriously insane, his skewed take on bushido leads him to enter violent encounters with everyone he meets.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

I finally bought a really fine brush and have been practicing inking in the professional style using a pot of India Ink (courtesy of Grointhief!). This is my first attempt. The greys are done with watercolours.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Contents include del Toro's awesome mansion filled with horror movie props and related artwork, sad musings on The Hobbit movies as he was planning to do them, and exciting ramblings about the forthcoming At the Mountains of Madness movie.

One exciting note (to me at least) is that one of my favourite comic book artists, Guy Davis (BPRD, The Marquis) is involved in the concepts for the creatures in this film.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

One of my favourite sequences in a comic, and one that I think is remarkable for a couple of reasons, comes from BPRD: Plague of Frogs #5. It is a creepy sequence of Abe Sapien (the mysterious fish-man who first appeared in Hellboy, and who is now a major character in the spin-off BPRD comics) having a near-death experience and getting a glimpse of his own strange past as a scientist/conspirator/Victorian dude.

The most obvious thing about this lengthy sequence (a couple of panels of which I have presented above entirely without permission) is that it has almost no dialogue.

The big panels and limited palette of sympathetic colours give a dreamy quality to the whole thing, and it goes for several pages, showing Abe, or Abe's astral form perhaps, floating amongst Cyclopean ruins which are straight out of Lovecraft.

The art is by Guy Davis, whose work I initially didn't like but now absolutely love. Anyway, it is a fine piece of art I read and re-read and you might like it too.

Looking at these last three posts together, it seems to me that they are getting progressively worse (not that I'm not generally happy with them all).

In trying to analyse why the first page posted works better than these others, I've noticed how striking the really large panel is. I do like the close-ups on this third page, but the wide middle panels on both this and the 2nd page bug me. Both panels try to show a room and have a lot of things to see in them – perhaps they would work better to show off important, single items? The abundant space should impart importance to the contents of the panel. At least that's what all that stuff about white space in graphic design suggests.

I also wonder if the scraps of Fort's diary that serve as indicators of time and place in the first panels wouldn't work better condensed into one in the first panel alone. It seems weird having the second panel saying they are at Crystal Palace when the first panel is of Crystal Palace.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

A design I did a few weeks ago in pen and pencil and only just got around to colouring with watercolours last night. This image has been touched up a little in Photoshop, mostly just increased saturation.

The pencil and paintbrush motif is just a reflection of my love of the "tools of the trade" (although I really prefer a mechanical pencil). The skull, roses and squid tentacles are just for coolness though.